Foundry Robotics raises a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike to run robot-staffed assembly factories for defence and industry

TLDR

• Foundry Robotics raised a $100M Series A led by Marlinspike Partners to run robot-staffed assembly factories.¹
• It assembles drones, undersea vehicles and satellite parts for defence and commercial customers; no valuation or revenue is disclosed.¹²
• Marlinspike, a dual-use venture firm, closed a $127M second fund on 2 July 2026.³

Foundry Robotics, an Emeryville, California start-up founded in 2026, announced on 28 October 2026 an oversubscribed $100 million Series A led by Marlinspike Partners, according to its release.¹ The release calls Khosla Ventures and Red Glass Ventures early backers, Hanabi and Zero Shot Fund existing investors, and SE Ventures, Wing VC and Axiom Ventures new investors; it does not say whether Marlinspike is new or existing.¹ citybiz reports that Foundry has not disclosed a valuation, its total funding to date or its revenue.²

The company says it builds and operates "autonomous factories" for complex assembly, selling manufacturing as a service: it owns the building, fills it with AI-powered robotic cells and takes a customer from design to production in weeks without a new production line.¹ Its software, FoundryOS, links the robots, the factory floor and the cloud, and the release claims that "the same cell that assembles a drone today can learn to build a satellite component tomorrow".¹ That is a company claim; no source shows output data. Listed applications include drones, autonomous vehicle subassemblies, wire harnesses, underwater vehicles, ground robots, rugged computers and satellites, and the footprint has grown twentyfold to 130,000 square feet.¹ No customer is named. Marlinspike's Mislav Tolusic says the founders are "quickly signing customers", and HII Unmanned Systems president Duane Fotheringham is quoted saying production capacity is "a national constraint on getting unmanned systems to the fleet", though the release does not say HII is a customer.¹ citybiz adds that Foundry has given no capacity target for Emeryville and no timetable for more factories.²

The money is for building out Emeryville, deploying AI models on the factory floor and hiring.¹ CEO Adarsh Kulkarni was employee number 4 at Ghost Robotics, which built legged robots for the US military, and later Scale AI's first head of robotics; co-founder Emmanuel Lamacchia was the programme manager for Tesla's Model Y.¹

On the lead investor, Marlinspike says it was founded in 2020, invests in dual-use technologies, and closed Marlinspike Disruptive Technology Fund II at $127 million on 2 July 2026, above a $75 million target.³ It names Anduril Industries, BrightAI, Layup Parts, Armada and JetZero among its holdings, and says it co-invested earlier in Palantir and Shield AI.³ Its fund release describes a thesis of "rebuilding the industrial base", which is the same gap Foundry targets.³

The earlier backers have a visible trail. Garuda announced its own investment on 10 March 2026, describing Foundry as a "dual-use contract manufacturer" and naming Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, Embark Ventures, Zero Shot Fund, Recall Capital and Hanabi Capital as co-investors.⁴ The Series A release does not mention Garuda, Embark or Recall, and the sources do not say whether they took part in this round.¹⁴ In April 2026 Foundry said it had raised $19 million in total seed funding and had a team of more than 20 from Tesla, Blue Origin, Scale AI and the University of Pennsylvania's GRASP Lab.⁵ The sources show no revenue against which to price the Series A.

Dealroom, using its own classification, puts the round in the top 3 per cent of all US deep-tech Series A rounds on record, and cites Arda Industries' $232 million launch this month and Maven Robotics' $100 million Series A in September as part of a rush into AI-driven factory automation; those figures have not been independently checked.⁶ It notes that Foundry's difference is owning and operating the factories rather than selling software or robots, and that the "autonomous factory" claim will be tested by repeatable production at scale.⁶

Why it matters: a dual-use venture firm is putting $100 million behind assembly capacity rather than a product, aimed at the production bottleneck for unmanned systems, but no customer, revenue or output figure is public yet.¹² Watch whether Foundry names customers or reports throughput from Emeryville.